B 


IRLF 


EXCHANGE 


KCHANGJS 


The  Genetic  View  of  Berkeley's 
Religious  Motivation 


BY 


G.  STANLEY  HALL,  Ph.  D.,  LL.  D. 

President,  Clark  University,  and  Professor  of  Psychology  and  Education 


Reprinted  from  JOUBNAL  OF  RELIGIOUS  PSYCHOLOGY 
April,  1912,  Vol.  V,  pp.  137-162 


THE  GENETIC  VIEW  OF  BERKELEY'S  RELIGIOUS 
MOTIVATION. 

BY  G.  STANLEY  HALL,  Ph.  D.,  LL.  D., 

President,  Clark  University,  and  Professor  of  Psychology  and  Education. 

Geneticism,  which  I  believe  to  be  at  once  the  philosophy  and 
the  psychology  of  the  future,  regards  the  world  not  sub  specie 
eternitatis,  but  sub  specie  generationis.  It  recognizes  both  prag- 
matism and  absolutism,  and  justifies  each  as  factors  in  its  I 
higher  synthesis.  It  holds  that  all  things  in  life  and  mind 
will  find  their  ultimate  explanation  only  when  all  the  stages 
of  their  origin  are  simply  but  correctly  described,  and  their 
evolution  set  forth  with  maximal  fulness.  It  believes  that 
nothing  that  mind  is  or  does,  has  been  or  has  done  in  the  past, 
or  will  be  and  will  do  in  the  future,  is  without  its  sufficient 
reason;  that  this  is  true  of  all  mental  products,  whether  they 
be  the  apparent  incoherence  of  mania  and  verbigeration,  or 
philosophical  problems  such  as  whether  unperceived  objects 
exist,  whether  we  think  of  things  differently  from  what  they 
are,  why  Plato  postulated  good,  and  Spinoza  substance,  as  their 
absolutes,  and  so  on.  It  would  subject  all  these  themes  to  its 
own  psychoanalysis,  and  also  the  study  of  practicalities  from 
Kant  to  Schiller,  James  and  Dewey,  in  order  to  find  out  the 
deeper  meanings  and  their  latent  content.  It  assumes  that 
Thorndike's  meliorism,  Strong's  substitutionism,  Pitken's 
world-picture,  Tawney's  purposive  consistency,  and  all  the 
newest  and  oldest  problems  of  epistemology,  and  the  present 
struggle  back  towards  the  terra  firma  of  realism,  even  in  re- 
ligion, do  not  one  of  them  say  all  that  they  mean,  and  some 
only  a  small  part;  that  most  of  the  expressions  of  psychic 
life  are  more  or  less  symbolic,  and  that  their  half-concealed, 

239320 


RELIGIOUS  PSYCHOLOGY 

half-revealed  meaning  will  be  brought  out  only  when  we  can 
get  through  and  back  of  their  form  in  consciousness  and  tell 
what  deeper  tendencies  they  express  and  how  historically  they 
came  to  take  on  their  present  forms.  With  Perry,  geneticism 
holds  that  the  theory  of  knowledge  arose  from  postulating 
matter  without  qualities  and  mind  without  extension,  and  that 
consciousness  must  be  reduced  to  a  form  of  energy,  but  that 
this  objective  is  only  another  aspect  of  subjective  psychology. 
W.  F.  Marvin  (Syllabus  of  an  Introduction  to  Philosophy,  p. 
129)  says,  ''Consciousness  is  nowhere,  that  is,  it  does  not  exist 
in  space,"  "nor  is  it  a  non-extended  point  in  space,"  "it  is,  in 
fact,  non-spatial."  And  McCosh  says  practically  the  same. 
What  relation  then  can  it  possibly  have  with  the  brain  or 
nerves?  Can  it  move,  or  can  anything  in  it  move?  Is  it  in 
time? 

It  is  frankly  admitted  that,  so  far,  geneticism  is 'little  more 
than  an  ideal  with  even  its  program  but  partially  developed, 
/  but  it  affords  a  new  and  lofty  viewpoint  from  which  to  survey 
\  with  equanimity  and  with  a  wide  horizon  all  the  conflicts  of 
.present  opinion,  and  to  give  them  fairly  a  true  perspective. 
It  can  already  rather  completely  solve  some  problems,  although, 
at  present,  it  asks  a  score  of  questions  for  every  one  it  can 
answer.  For  this  reason,  it  will  not  appeal  to  those  who  seek 
completeness,  or  believe  that  we  have  already  arrived,  or  that 
it  is  noon-day  rather  than  a  very  early  morning  hour  in  phil- 
osophy. Thus,  it  is  not  a  view  that  will  commend  itself  to 
those  who  seek  finality,  still  less  to  those  who  have  already 
accepted  or  wrought  out  a  closed  system.  All  these  should 
be  warned  betimes  that  their  place  is  not  in  the  camp  of  the 
/geneticists. 

Geneticism  began  but  recently  and  obscurely  with  a  few 
empirical  data,  its  view  being  for  the  most  part  neglected  by 
those  who  wrought  in  the  field  of  mind,  and  we  were  very 
modest.  But  its  growth  has,  of  late,  been  amazing,  and  far 
beyond  the  early  dreams  of  its  originators,  or  the  knowledge 
of  those  who  have  neglected  it.  It  is  already  beginning  to  read 
its  title  clear  to  become  the  chief  stone  of  the  corner,  entirely 
ignored  though  it  still  is  by  most  of  the  guild  of  system-build- 
ers.  From  the  observation  of  simpler  and  higher  animal  forms, 
and  of  the  minds  and  conduct  of  children,  normal  and  defec- 
tive, it  has  already  come  to  realize  that  the  great  speculative 


GENETICISM   AND  BERKELEY  139 

minds  of  history  are  but  children  of  a  larger  growth,  that  each 
system  is  only  a  set  of  more  or  less  carefully  wrought-out 
returns  to  nature's  great  unwritten  questionnaire,  which,  from 
long  before  the  days  of  the  Sphinx  down,  has  always  been  ask- 
ing what  is  man  and  his  place  in  the  world,  what  can  he  know, 
what  should  he  do,  how  feel,  how  did  he  and  all  his  problems 
arise  from  great  Mother  Nature,  and  what  will  be  his  end?  To 
the  geneticists,  all  philosophemes,  whether  of  children  or  adults, 
wise  or  otherwise,  are  only  more  or  less  precious  data  for  study- 
ing human  types  of  soul,  temperament,  diathesis  and  disposi- 
tion.1 Hence  the  geneticist  can  never  be  a  materialist  or  an 
idealist,  a  dogmatist  or  a  positivist,  or  any  of  the  rest,  because 
to  him  each  is  legitimate  and  has  its  own  justification,  and 
expresses  a  type  of  character  and  mental  tastes  and  opinions, 
which  it  is  his  task  thoroughly  to  know  and  sympathetically 
appreciate  and,  in  the  end,  harmoniously  synthetize  into  a  new 
and  greater  harmony,  nothing  less  than  the  symphony  of  man- 
soul  itself.  Those  who  need  to  do  so  may  still  make  the  per- 
sonally-conducted and  well-traveled  tour  through  Locke,  Berke- 
ley, Hume  and  Kant,  viewing  the  absolute  idealism  of  the 
theory  of  knowledge,  the  best  lesson  of  which  is  the  realization 
that  every  psychic  bane  produces  its  own  antidote  or  antiseptic, 
in  this  case,  the  new  realism  of  the  immediate  intuitionists  like 
Stumpf  and,  in  a  different  way,  Mach  and  Bergson ;  while  others 
may  prefer  Schurman  and  the  old  short  circuit  of  the  Scotch 
philosophy  (Reid  and  Stewart)  of  common  sense,  which  bars 
this  detour. 

The  epistemological  microbe  is  most  infectious  at  the  very 
dawn  of  the  teens,  as  so  many  studies  have  shown.  At  no  age 
is  the  mind  so  prone  to  sudden  and  spontaneous  obsessions  of 
the  question-mania  regarding  ultimate  things.  The  collections 
of  childish  queries  and  speculations  upon  these  themes  should 
be  very  suggestive  to  philosophers.  Like  childish  distempers, 
however,  all  these  insistent  questionings  as  to  what  knowledge 
and  reality  really  are  are  innocuous  and  leave  a  very  whole- 
some immunizing  agency  behind  them,  unless  they  come  too 

*As  an  early  illustration  of  this  tendency,  see  "  Visualization  as  a 
Chief  Source  of  the  Psychology  of  Hobbes,  Locke,  Berkeley  and  Hume," 
by  Alexander  Eraser.  Am.  Jour,  of  Psy.  Dec.,  1891.  Vol.  4,  No.  2,  pp. 
230-247.  Also  his  "  The  Psychological  Foundation  of  Natural  Real- 
ism." Jtid.  April,  1892.  Vol.  4,  No.  3,  pp.  429-450. 


140  JOURNAL  OF   RELIGIOUS  PSYCHOLOGY 

late  in  life,  when  they  are  much  more  severe  and  the  effects 
more  lasting  and  harder  to  recover  from. 

Thus,  while  the  geneticist  yields  not  even  to  the  metaphysi- 
cian and  epistemologist  in  his  appreciation  of  .the  great  phil- 
osophic systems,  he  regards  them  in  a  very  different  light.  He 
sees  in  none  of  them  ultimate  or  eternal  truth,  but  considers 
/  \  them  as  expressions  of  two  things:  First,  of  a  certain  age,  race 
and  nation.  Not  one  of  these  systems  could  possibly  have  been 
developed  in  any  other  time  or  environment.  Thus,  like  the 
ancient  prophets  each  has  always  a  primarily  historical  and 
never  a  scientific  value.  Their  authors  do  not  address  us  or 
our  time,  but  others  of  a  very  different  one.  This  is  the  new, 
historic,  versus  the  old  dogmatic  and  partisan  view,  which 
since  Zeller  and  Fischer  has  been  progressively  recognized. 
Discipleship  takes  us  out  of  our  own  age  into  that  of  one  that 
has  passed  and  gone.  Many  of  the  problems  and  issues  that 
inspired  both  methods  and  conclusions  of  the  great  classical 
writers  are  simply  dead  from  atrophy,  or  they  are  settled ;  and 
it  is  robbing  the  grave  to  resurrect  them,  save  as  an  academic 
exercise  in  the  history  of  thought  and  culture. 

The  second  determining  element  in  the  old  systems  is  the 
personality  of  the  philosopher  himself,  for  his  biography  is 
always  the  other  key  to  his  scheme  of  things.  Idealists,  episte- 
mologists,  dogmatists,  empiricists,  and  all  other  schools,  are 
some  more,  some  less,  temperamental  as  well  as  creedal.  Phil- 
osophers have  been  always  partisan,  criticizing  and  rejecting 
those  of  other  sects.  Each  interprets  the  universe  according 
to  his  own  individuality  and  is  not  content,  like  scientific  men, 
to  contribute  a  tiny  brick  to  the  same  vast  temple  others  are 
building.  To  the  geneticists,  these  schools  and  creeds  must 
always  be  studied  judiciously,  comparatively,  sympathetically, 
but  none  of  them  can  ever,  possibly  be  regarded  as  a  finality. 
Each  represents  a  species  of  the  genus,  "man  of  culture."  A 
philosophy  is  the  very  acme  of  self-expression,  as  science  often 
is  of  self-abnegation  and  subordination.  There  is  no  other 
field,  not  even  literature  or  art,  in  which  a  man  of  education 
can  vent  himself  with  more  self -abandon  over  so  wide  an  area, 
and  can  choose  his  own  periscope  almost  anywhere  in  it.  He 
cannot  be  a  specialist,  but  must  be  a  generalist.  He  alone  can 
follow  his  own  thought  freely,  fearlessly,  wherever  it  may  lead 
him,  weaving  into  it  any  color  or  patterns  that  seem  to  him  good, 


GENETICISM    AND   BERKELEY  141 

provided  only  he  weave  a  careful  or  well-wrought  picture.  More 
than  any  other  writer's,  a  philosopher's  opinions  are  matters 
of  his  own  taste,  which  no  amount  of  disputation  can  change. 
If  expression  be  the  supreme  luxury,  the  speculative  philosopher 
attains  this  felicity  of  complete  self-indulgence  in  his  own  opin- 
ions most  completely.  To  be  carefully  explained  by  posterity, 
has  been  called  the  highest  criterion  of  success  in  authorship, 
and  we  may  add  that,  to  explain  the  philosopher  psychologically, 
is  one  of  the  chief  new  duties  which  our  science  now  owes  to 
the  great  speculative  minds  of  the  past.  For  geneticism,  they 
all  represent  what  Hegel  characterizes  as  an  animal  kingdom 
of  mind.  They  challenge  us  to  study  their  types.  No  other 
intellects  have  ever  blossomed  so  fully,  none  written  so  con- 
fessionally  or  revelatorily  of  what  is  in  man's  soul.  In  vino 
veritas,  that  is,  men  are  all  drunk  with  the  spirit  of  truth  and 
the  passion  to  utter  it,  to  show  forth  their  inmost  soul,  only 
we  must  have  the  wit  to  do  much  interpretation.  Psychological 
criticism  thus  must  go  back  of  what  these  systems  say,  in  order 
to  find  all  or  most  that  they  mean.  They  thought  that  they 
expressed  certain  things  in  certain  ways.  We  shall  find  that 
they  expressed  very  different  things  in  very  different  ways. 
We  must  first  take  the  trouble  of  understanding  their  own  con- 
sciousness and,  to  do  this,  must  often  lay  bare  what  they  would 
fain  conceal.  We  must  seek  for  a  deeper  motive  for  all  they 
said.  Their  documents  tell  us  how  the  world  looked  from  be- 
neath their  own  skull-pans,  and  we  must  not  only  vividly 
revive  their  images  and  sentiments,  as  a  starting  point  from 
which  to  proceed  to  a  further  analysis,  comparison,  interpreta- 
tion, diagnosis  of  Anlagen,  but  trace  out  genetic  stages  to  their 
causes  and  motivations  till  we  understand  them  far  better  than 
they  could  possibly  understand  themselves.  This  genetic  psy- 
chology is  far  vaster  than  all  systems  or  creeds,  for  these  are 
but  two  of  the  many  fields  it  cultivates, 

Appallingly  great  as  is  this  task,  even  it  is  but  part,  for  the 
geneticist  must  also  consider  not  only  the  latest  twigs  on  the 
old  tree  of  psychic  life,  as  represented  by  the  most  cultivated 
adult  men  and  women  of  to-day,  but  he  must  consider  all 
phases  and  stages  of  development  of  mind  in  every  animal  form, 
with  each  extinct  species  of  which  a  specific  type  of  soul-life 
went  out  and  was  lost  to  the  world.  He  must  peer  wherever 
possible  into  the  past,  list  and  scrutinize  every  vestige  of 


. 


142  JOURNAL   OP   RELIGIOUS   PSYCHOLOGY 

psychic  adaptation  from  the  very  beginning,  and  everything 
else  that  may  serve  as  a  key  to  what  is  gone,  so  as  to  restore 
the  missing  links  of  mind  wherever  possible.  Hence,  while 
he  must  introspect  to  the  uttermost,  he  must  realize  that  what 
he  finds  in  himself  is  only  a  small  and  fragmentary  part  of 
the  entire  world  of  mind  and  that  objective  methods  and  data 
must  be  his  chief  reliance ;  that  he  must,  in  a  new  sense,  become 
a  citizen  of  all  times,  lands  and  climes  and  the  spectator  of 
all  events.  He  must  especially  be  on  his  guard  against  be- 
coming a  banausic  provincial  solipsist  in  his  own  field  or  a 
stand-patter  of  any  school.  To  be  a  humanist,  large  as  the 
term  is,  is  not  enough. 

What,  for  the  geneticist,  is  the  most  perfect  type  of  knowl- 
edge, and  what  wins  man's  most  complete  belief?  It  is  sen- 
\sation,  which  is  also  the  first  and  oldest  of  all  psychic  processes. 
Seeing  is  believing.  What  sane  man,  with  normal  senses,  ever 
really  did  or  could  doubt  the  great  body  of  their  deliverances? 
Countless  generations  of  beings  have  relied  implicitly  on  their 
evidence.  Had  they  not  for  eons  been  the  most  trustworthy  of 
all  witnesses,  no  psyche  would  ever  have  been  evolved  and  ani- 
mal life  without  them  is  inconceivable.  Subjectively  considered, 
sensation  is  not  only  the  primordial  but  the  most  direct  and 
immediate  of  all  intuitions,  and  has,  from  the  first,  shaped  not 
only  all  vital  functions  but  structures  into  conformity  with 
and  adaptation  to  the  external  world.  Now,  what  is  the  essen- 
tial feature  in  all  sensation?  What  is  its  purpose  and  end? 
Not  the  act  of  perception  itself,  as  Berkeleyans  aver,  but  a  real 
outer  object  independent  of  the  perceiver,  not  his  eject,  pro- 
ject, or  any  extradition  of  his  consciousness.  If  we  perceive,  we 
perceive  something  not  ourselves.  Whether  it  be  perceived 
truly  as  it  is,  or  in  a  symbolic  way,  every  candid  analysis  of 
the  act  of  sensation  or  perception  finds  an  object  over  against 
a  subject,  a  counterposed  non-ego  over  against  an  ego.  Thus, 
there  is  an  ineluctable  realistic  basis,  no  matter  how  trans- 
formed it  be,  to  every  true  perception.  This  bottom  fact,  the 
exceptional  cases  of  illusions  and  hallucinations  should  no  more 
discredit  than  the  fact  of  the  existence  of  idiots  and  deviates 
of  many  kinds  should  shock  our  confidence  in  sanity,  or  sick- 
ness and  weakness  make  us  doubt  health  and  strength.  For 
the  most  part,  then,  the  senses  are  the  most  truthful  of  all  our 
faculties,  the  creators  of  automatisms  and  habits,  the  sovereign 


GENETICISM    AND   BERKELEY  143 

lords  of  behavior  and  conduct,  the  mother  of  mind  throughout 
both  the  animal  and  human  world.  They  may  err,  but  they 
do  so  rarely  or  under  peculiar  conditions,  and  all  errors  tend 
to  be  corrected.  Most  of  the  defects  philosophers  are  so  fond 
of  charging  up  against  them  are  really  faults  of  interpretation, 
showing  no  lack  of  faithful  deliverances  on  their  part.  Indeed, 
so  invincible  is  their  testimony,  that,  where  subjective  stimuli 
cause  false  sensations,  they  do  not  need  to  be  very  often  repeated 
to  compel  belief  in  the  objective  reality  they  falsely  assert,  so 
that,  as  Helmholtz  says,  the  soundest  mind  can  not  long  re- 
main proof  against  habitual  illusions  of  perception.  To  suspect 
the  habitual  veracity  of  sense  thus  brings  panic  and  confusion 
and  is  due,  on  the  part  of  those  who  stress  them,  either  to  an 
exceptional  number  of  illusions  in  their  own  experience,  or  else 
to  some  often  hidden  motivation  or  unconscious  wish  which 
causes  them  to  over-emphasize  the  exceptional  fallacies  of  pen*- 
ception  and  to  interpret  sound  in  the  light  of  unsound  experi- 
ences, rather  than  conversely,  as  they  should.  Implicit_bejief 
in  the  senses,  therefore,  is  the  most  common  form  of  sound 
common  sense,  for  there  is  no  reality  or  certainty  in  the  unl- 
verse  that  can  begin  for  a  moment  to  compare  with  that  of  a 
thing  seen,  felt,  or  otherwise  sensed.  That  gives  us  a  paradigm 
of  every  other  kind  of  reality,  knowledge,  and  certainty,  the 
degree  of  which  is  directly  in  proportion  as  it  approximates 
this,  which  can  never  be  suppressed.  The  very  etymologies 
of  every  one  of  the  terms  designating  the  so-called  higher  or 
more  complex  psychic  processes  show  how  sense  forms  and 
images  of  the  various  types  pervade  all  mental  processes.  Even 
science,  according  to  Avenarius,  grows  perfect  just  in  propor- 
tion as  it  formulates  the  universe  in  terms  of  possible  sense- 
experience,  for  this  makes  us  able  to  think  the  world  with  the 
greatest  economy  or  conservation  of  mental  energy. 

Conversely,  whatever  we  try  ta  take  out  of  the  sense-world 
loses  reality  just  as  far  as  we  succeed  in  the  attempt.  To  deny 
space  relations  of  extension  and  position  to  anything,  even  God, 
soul,  thought,  is  to  rob  it  of  its  most  essential  reality,  and  con- 
demn it  to  lead  a  hovering  limbo-life  in  the  pallid  realms  of 
nominalism:  it  is  to  cut  the  tap-root  of  genuine  belief  in  its 
existence,  because  everything  that  truly  is,  even  mind,  thought, 
soul,  God,  is  somewhere,  although  we  may  know  nothing  as  to 
its  position,  size  or  shape.  For  the  geneticist,  thus,  sense  is 


144  JOURNAL   OF   RELIGIOUS   PSYCHOLOGY 

the  foundation  of  everything  in  the  psyche;  and  one  of  his 
great  problems  is  to  trace,  step  by  step,  how  the  world  of  mind 
evolved  from  this  basis.  To  impeach  its  witness,  is,  therefore, 
to  make  psychology  and  philosophy  air-plants  striking  no  roots 
into  mother-earth,  and  to  rob  them  of  the  most  essential  criteria 
of  truth.  It  condemns  philosophizing  to  do  its  business  with 
a  paper  of  currency  of  promises  to  pay,  when  there  is  no  specie 
basis. 

This  being  so,  the  geneticist  who  must  explain,  evaluate 
and  find  partial  truth  in  all  things,  deviative  as  well  as  norma- 
tive, must  tell  us  why,  for  instance,  Berkeley  and  the  subjective 
idealists  came  to  proclaim  sense-perception  bankrupt,  and  must 
weigh  their  evidences,  must  ask  what  was  the  underlying  motive 
of  their  elaborated  solipsism,  their  rejection  of  what  is  so  car- 
dinal and  inexpugnable.  What  was  the  deeper  faith  that 
underlay  their  honest  doubts,  for  that  these  always  exist,  the 
geneticist,  for  whom  there  is  no  error,  must  always  assume. 

For  this  new  psychoanalysis,  despite  the  little  known  of  his 
early  family  life,  the  case  of  Berkeley  offers  us,  on  the  whole, 
a  most  favorable  example.  His  biographer,  Eraser,  speaks  of 
his  ' '  singularly  emotional  disposition. ' '  Irish,  his  fervid  genius 
may  in  many  points  well  be  compared  with  that  of  his  great 
Irish  precursor,  Scotus  Erigena,  the  morning-star  of  medieval, 
as  Berkeley  became  of  modern,  scholasticism.  The  dreamery 
and  imaginings  of  this  "romantic  boy,"  "distrustful  at  the 
age  of  eight  years,"  and  "so  by  nature  disposed  for  new  doc- 
trine," as  he  says  of  himself,  were  matured  by  a  country -home 
near  an  old  castle,  such  as  fired  the  genius  of  Walter  Scott, 
till  at  the  age  of  eleven  he  was  sent  to  the  nearest  town-school 
at  Kilkenny,  the  Eton  of  Ireland,  where  he  spent  the  four  most 
susceptible  years  of  pubescence.  "Precocious,"  well-prepared 
and  finding  the  curriculum  easy,  there  is  a  tradition,  says 
Fraser,  that  "he  fed  his  imagination  with  the  airy  vision  of 
romance  and  thus  weakened  the  natural  sense  of  the  difference 
between  illusion  and  reality."  He  was  also  very  susceptible 
to  the  charms  that  nature  had  lavishly  spread  about  this  region, 
which  he  loved  to  explore  and  to  feel  all  its  thanatopsis  and 
other  mystic  moods,  and  the  inevitable  provocation  to  specu- 
late as  to  its  meaning  and  man's  origin,  and  place  in  all  the 
mighty  scheme.  How  deeply  he  could  appreciate  this  is  seen 


GENETICISM    AND   BERKELEY  145 

in  one  of  the  very  earliest  of  his  writings,  an  account  of  a  visit 
to  the  cave  of  Dunmore  near  by. 

At  the  age  of  fifteen,  in  1700,  he  went  to  Trinity  College, 
Dublin,  where,  some  three  years  later,  he  began  his  lately  dis- 
covered (printed  in  1871)  Common-place  Book,  kept  for  years, 
which  gives  us  exceptional  insight  into  the  seethings  of  his  mind. 
In  it  he  communes  with  himself,  apparently  with  no  thought 
that  any  other  eye  would  see  these  jottings.  In  this  precious, 
almost  confessional  document,  we  see  that  the  reveried  gropings 
and  obstinate  questioning  so  germane  to  childhood,  as  it  begins 
to  merge  into  manhood  and  realize  things  in  a  new  way,  had  not 
in  his  case  been  left  to  fade  into  the  light  of  common  day,  but 
that  he  had  mused  and  pondered  over  them  with  rare  fascina- 
tion. His  enthusiasm  and  perfervid  fancy  teemed  with  queries 
concerning  the  true  meaning  of  reality  in  the  world  of  sense. 
We  find  here  a  consuming  desire  to  promulgate  a  new  doctrine 
which  should  "make  short  work  of  all  the  supposed  powers  of 
dead  unconscious  matter;"  should  banish  perplexity  and  con- 
tradiction, sap  the  roots  of  religious  scepticism,  and  bring  -  a 
new  harmony  of  science  and  theology.  All  these  centered  in  his 
new-old  scepticism  concerning  things  we  see  and  touch,  or  the 
visibilia  and  the  tangibilia.  He  would  make  a  great  coup,  which 
should  bring  consternation  to  the  critics  of  religion,  by  his  tu 
quoque  argument  that  students  of  nature  also  work  by  faith, 
knowing  the  material  world  only  by  a  system  of  symbols  slowly 
evolved  and  associated  in  ways  that  could  be  subjected  to  a 
most  destructive  criticism.  During  his  thirteen  years  at  Dub- 
lin, which  he  left  at  twenty-eight,  this  Guy  Fawkes  of  naive 
natural  realism  had  pretty  well  matured  and  had  scrappily  laid 
his  plot  against  common  sense,  but  had  done  it  in  the  sweetest 
unconsciousness  of  all  the  negative  implications  that  ever  since 
have  flowed  from  it.  He  would  impeach  and  discredit  the  most 
ancient  trusted  oracles  of  mankind  by  a  flank  movement  against 
the  critics  of  transcendentalities,  by  showing  that  matter  too 
was  really  immaterial,  was  only  a  practical  postulate  on  the 
plane  of  sense,  which  must  be,  in  fact,  everywhere  accepted  by 
an  act  of  faith.  He  would  subjectify  even  the  objects  of  per- 
ception, and  make  each  individual  the  creator  of  his  own  phys- 
ical world,  and  bring  to  Modern  Europe  the  old  Indie  psychosis 
of  maya,  which  looks  out  upon  nature  as  only  a  phantasmagoria 
of  magic-lantern  effects  projected  upon  the  tabula  rasa  of  time 


146  JOURNAL   OF   RELIGIOUS   PSYCHOLOGY 

and  space,  the  objective  reality  of  which  latter  it  never  occurred 
to  him  to  doubt.  Things  are  only  phenomenal;  noumena  are 
spiritual,  higher,  surer,  truer,  in  fact,  the  only  actual  realities. 
Though  not  deeply  concerned  for  things  ecclesiastical,  caring 
little  for  the  conventional  orthodoxy  of  his  day,  he  was  heart 
and  soul  a  religionist,  and  most  of  all  concerned  to  vindicate  the 
ways  of  God  in  nature  and  mind,  and  to  subject  science  to  faith. 
Long  he  pondered  the  ways  and  means  of  the  most  effective 
propaganda  of  these  doctrines,  so  that  they  should  bring  most 
startling  consternation  into  the  camp  of  the  scientists,  whose 
claims  constituted  the  chief  atmosphere  of  academic  Dublin, 
which  he  found  saturated  and  fermenting  with  them,  for  no- 
where in  Britain  was  there  any  center  of  scientific  interest  and 
activity  to  be  compared  at  that  time  with  Trinity,  which  had 
so  lately  been  awakened  to  the  new  light. 

To  a  youth  of  Berkeley's  genius,  whose  mind  was  still  full  of 
the  dreams  of  boyhood,  all  this  was  stimulating  to  the  point  of 
exhilaration  and  yet  baffling  to  all  his  deeply-rooted  and  hitherto 
fondly-cherished  tendencies.  He  was  charmed,  yet  recusant; 
"drawn,  but  repelled.  Where  was  the  place,  and  what  was  the 
justification,  in  an  atmosphere  so  charged  and  saturated  with 
science,  for  a  purely  idealistic  diathesis,  closing  in  about  which 
the  world  of  law  and  necessity  brought  almost  claustrophobic 
symptoms?  He  could  not,  like  the  more  prosaic  Lotze,  whose 
soul  was  long  perturbed  by  the  same  antithesis,  admit  that  the 
mechanical  view  of  the  world  was  everywhere  present,  but  every- 
where subordinate,  for  this  would  imply  compromise,  and  of 
this  the  Berkeleyan  type  of  mind  never  knows  even  the  meaning. 
Ordained  at  the  age  of  twenty-four,  preaching  occasionally,  he 
had  given  hostages  to  the  Christian  religion,  and  his  impetuous 
temperament,  chafed  as  it  was,  stormed  at  by  free-thinkers  like 
Tolland,  John  Browne,  Molyneux  (in  his  new  dioptrics),  Locke, 
Newton,  Hobbes,  Descartes,  Boyle  and  the  great  Greeks  (for  he 
became  Greek  professor  at  the  age  of  twenty-two),  his  realiza- 
tion that  "things  are  thinks,"  to  use  Bronson  Alcott's  expres- 
sion, brought  thus  a  great  revolution,  and  also  a  profound  peace 
to  his  perturbed  soul.  This  was  all  new  and  most  stimulating 
to  him.  He  felt  that  his  own  view  would  clear  up  "all  those 
contradictions  and  inexplicable,  perplexing  absurdities  that 
have  in  all  ages  been  a  reproach  to  human  reason."  He  knew 
too  that  there  was  "a  mighty  set  of  men"  who  would  oppose 


GENETICISM    AND   BERKELEY 

and  vilipend  him,  but  he  vows  to  cling  to  his  transrrming 
thought.  With  it,  he  says,  he  has  "a  heart  of  ease,"  knowing 
that  things  of  sense  are  ideas,  a  thesis,  as  Fraser  says,  "not  in- 
telligible to  his  contemporaries  and  immediate  successors,  and 
he  had  only  an  imperfect  consciousness  of  it  himself."  He 
sought  with  the  greatest  enthusiasm  to  restore  spiritual  beliefs 
and  higher  ideals  of  life  in  a  materialistic  age.  He  was  really  ' 
"  against  his  own  intention,  opening  the  door  for  the  most  thor- 
oughgoing scepticism  and  agnosticism  ever  offered  to  the  world." 

This  made  Berkeley  the  enfant  terrible  of  modern  philoso- 
phers, the  arch-sceptic  of  all  sceptics,  casting  doubt  upon  the 
most  fundamental  belief  of  the  world.  Never  has  there  been  a 
philosophy  so  purely  one  of  temperament  and  so  infectious  to 
those  of  like  diathesis.  To  the  sedentary  aloofness  from  prac- 
tical affairs  of  academic  life  and  isolation  greater  for  specu- 
lators than  for  those  in  any  other  chairs,  he  added  his  own 
visionary  temperament,  his  theological  bias,  and  the  special 
incitement  of  finding  himself  in  the  midst  of  the  hottest  battle 
so  far  waged  between  science  and  faith,  where,  with  lines 
closely  drawn  and  combatants  in  serried  array  on  either  side, 
he  would  be  a  new  David  coming  forth  with  his  sling  against 
the  great  Philistine,  science.  But  here  the  simile  ends,  for  his 
sling  did  chief  execution  in  his  own  ranks,  which  have  ever  since 
been  more  discomfited  than  have  either  the  scientists  or  the 
every-day  naive  realists.  >  His  great  secret  of  visual  and  tactual 
immaterialism  consisted  in  applying  what  Locke  had  said  of  the 
secondary  to  the  primary  qualities  of  matter,  and  it  was  both 
inspired  and  used  as  a  method  of  causing  physical  things  to 
vanish  and  to  reveal  in  their  places  the  eternal  spirit  and  uni- 
versal reason.1  The  early  stages  of  his  writings  were  negative, 
while  later  the  dominating  motive  was  more  in  evidence.  We 
live  and  move  and  have  our  being  in  God.  We  realize  this  ' '  in- 
tellectually, philosophically  and  practically  by  assimilation  to 
God  who  is  reason  and  spirit  and  reality,  so  supreme"  that,  in 
His  presence,  the  sensible  world  fades  away  and  only  things 
unseen  are  really  eternal.  , 

Thus  we  find  the  underlying  motive  deeper  than  his  own  con- 
sciousness, a  bias  probably  never  realized  by  himself.  His 
all-dominant  wish  was  to  exalt  the  cause  of  faith  and  reason 
above,  and  at  the  expense  of,  that  of  sense,  not  content  like 
Paul  to  postulate  a  new  special  organ  of  transcendentalities,  to 


r 


148  JOURNAL   OP   RELIGIOUS  PSYCHOLOGY 

parallel  the  domain  of  the  sensory,  thus  giving  us  a  dual  world 
order;  not  quite  a  visionary,  he  yet  believed  the  pipe-dreams 
of  his  own  imagination  until  this  faculty  had  become  so  vivid 
as  to  claim  the  same  credence  as  sense.  Like  Swedenborg,  he 
was  satisfied  with  the  mystic  and  absorbed  contemplation  of 
things  divine  till  the  physical  world  seemed  empty  and  for- 
gotten, as  to  the  ecstatic  newer  Platonists.  To  these  views 
he  turned  with  special  fondness  in  his  old  age.  Incapable  of 
the  unique  ontological  method  of  Parmenides  or  Spinoza  in 
resting  everything  on  the  deductive  or  mathematical  elabora- 
tion of  an  absolutist's  creed,  his  pugnacious  Irish  disposition 
impelled  him  as  Philonous  to  carry  aggressive  warfare  into 
the  Hylic  Court  with  the  new  weapon  that  turned  the  burden 
of  proof  on  his  adversaries  and  opened  a  new  mine  of  psycho- 
logical veins  of  doubt  beneath  their  very  feet,  by  convincing 
all  who  put  their  trust  in  sense  of  a  credulity  if  not  a  super- 
stition even  grosser  than  that  which  scepticism  had  charged 
up  against  religionists.  Thus,  by  breaking  the  bonds  of  sense, 
C  human  might  be  sublimated  into  divine  thought  as  in  his  later 
writings,  especially  in  Alciphron  and  Siris  he  seeks  to  doi  posi- 
tively. Even  Micromegas  on  the  dog  star,  with  his  thousand 
senses,  got  no  satisfaction,  but  only  growing  perplexity  from 
them.  Thus,  this  author  of  the  philosophy  of  a  recrudescent 
Hindu  maya  gave  the  world  a  shock,  which  for  subsequent  stu- 
dents in  the  field  brought  actual  disenchantment  with  nature 
by  tarnishing  its  pristine  charm  and  immediateness,  and  those 
who  felt  its  full  force  and  then  succeeded  in  facing  it  down, 
returned  to  the  world  somewhat  as  convalescents,  after  grave 
disease,  look  out  through  the  sickroom  windows  upon  the  pal- 
pitating life  of  man,  while  they  muster  strength  again  to  face 
the  world  with  courage  and  resolution  as  recuperative  agencies 
bring  them  back  to  it  again.  They  have  trod  the  way  of  death 
far  enough  toward  the  end  to  have  lost  their  way  back  for  a 
time,  but  this  experience  was  necessary,  and  was  prescribed, 
in  fact,  not  only  as  giving  immunity  against  all  less  mortal 
microbes  of  doubt,  but  because  those  sick  nigh  unto  death  may 
return  to  life  with  a  more  vivid  sense  of  the  reality  of  things 
unseen  beyond  the  veil. 

His  Bermuda  scheme  occupied  a  prominent,  if  not  the  chief, 
place  in  his  mind  from  the  age  of  thirty-six  to  forty-six.  Realiz- 
ing, from  his  travels  on  the  continent  and  his  life  in  London, 


GENETICISM   AND  BERKELEY  149 

the  corruption  of  Europe,  which,  to  his  pure  soul,  seemed  to 
predict  ruin,  his  ardent  social  idealism  led  him  to  plan  a  college 
on  the  Bermuda  Islands,  600  miles  from  land,  where  both  the 
sons  of  British  colonists  and  native  Indians  from  the  continent 
of  America  could  be  educated.  Long  he  schemed  to  raise 
money  for  his  Utopian  institution  on  these  beautiful  summer 
islands,  to  which  his  fancy  gave  a  halo  of  romance.  When 
Swift  privately  married  Stella,  and  the  unhappy  Vanessa, 
whom  he  had  never  seen,  bequeathed  to  Berkeley  her  fortune 
of  some  3,000  pounds,  this  asset  and  the  charter  and  grant 
from  Parliament,  together  with  private  subscriptions,  seemed 
to  him  to  warrant  the  realization  of  his  hopes,  and  so,  in  1829, 
he  landed,  not  at  the  Bermudas,  but  at  Newport,  where  he 
began  his  bucolic  life,  wrote  and  waited  for  the  special  grant 
of  30,000  pounds  which  had  been  voted  for  his  project,  but 
which  Walpole  never  sent.  Here  too  he  wrote  his  Alciphron, 
which  marked  a  distinct  advance  from  his  phenomenological 
standpoint  to  an  actual  hypostatization  of  Plato's  ideas,  and 
here  he  inspired  Samuel  Johnson  and  Jonathan  Edwards.  But, 
after  nearly  three  years,  he  sailed  for  home,  a  disappointed 
man,  never  having  seen  the  Bermudas  nor  his  college,  but  con- 
soled by  his  transcendental  speculations.  In  America,  he 
charmed  everyone,  as  he  always  did,  and  gave  a  great  impulse 
to  metaphysical  speculation  to  the  few  scholars  here  inclined 
that  way.  He  had  found  consolation  for  the  disenchantments 
of  immaterialism  in  a  greatly  augmented  sense  of  the  reality 
of  the  supernal  world,  where  alone  noumena  were  found.  All 
phenomena  were  only  media  through  which  we  discern  the  in- 
telligent and  divine  spirit.  Eeligion  alone  is  the  perfection  of 
man.  Indeed,  we  can  see  God  even  more  truly  than  we  can 
see  nature  or  the  soul  of  our  friends.  Reason  is  begotten  of 
faith.  All  nature  is  but  a  revelation  of  God.  Thus  Berkeley 
\  sought  to  regenerate  the  New  World  by  his  new  idealism.  In 
the  crude  practical  civilization  of  this  country,  as  it  was  in  his 
day,  where  the  chief  energies  of  men  were  directed  to  the  con- 
quest of  nature,  the  enthusiastic  espousal  of  his  crude  idealism 
by  the  chosen  few  was  a  contrast  effect  of  reaction  from  a 
materialistic  civilization,  and  suggests  the  strange  success  of 
Dr.  William  Harris'  propaganda  of  Hegelism  in  the  raw  cul- 
ture of  St.  Louis,  thirty  years  ago.  Pioneer-life  complemented 
itself  by  crass  religious  creeds,  while  the  few  more  thoughtful 


150  JOURNAL  OP   RELIGIOUS  PSYCHOLOGY 

minds  turned  to  a  crass  philosophy  which  was  the  diametrical 
opposite  of  their  practical  lives.  Thus  extremes  met,  and  this 
effect  was  heightened  by  the  fact  that  Berkeley's  socialistic 
ideas  were  favored  by  the  callow  Utopian  democratic  dream- 
eries of  our  pre-Revolutionary  days. 

This  was  the  most  romantic  of  all  romantic  missionary  enter- 
prises, and  might  almost  be  compared  with  the  South  Sea  Bubble 
and  the  tulip-mania. 

In  remote  rural  Cloyne,  where,  after  a  period  of  controversy, 
the  last  eighteen  years  of  his  life,  from  forty-nine  on,  were  spent, 
when  famine  and  fever  had  ravaged  the  region,  and  his  own 
health  was  impaired,  he  sought  a  panacea  for  all  bodily,  as 
hitherto  he  had  for  all  mental  and  social  ills,  and  found  it  in 
tar-water,  and  his  Siris  or  chain  of  aphorisms  on  this  subject 
was  written  and  became  at  once  by  far  the  most  popular  of 
all  his  works.  The  culminating  thought  of  his  life  was  of  a 
universal  agent,  the  one  true  remedy  of  remedies,  the  great 
reality  revealed  though  concealed  by  sense.  This  nauseous  drug, 
now  shrunken  to  a  very  humble  place  in  the  medical  pharma- 
copoeia, became  the  only  drug  in  his  household,  and  about  it 
he  spun  a  system  of  philosophical  halos.  It  became  the  fashion, 
and  factories  were  established  to  make  it.  It  was  to  open  a 
new  era  to  the  world.  Though  itself  a  phenomenal  drug,  it  had 
behind  it  the  infinite  source  of  life,  and  those  charged  with 
it  would  make  unprecedented  advances,  physically,  mentally 
and  morally.  It  thus  became,  as  his  biographer  says,  the  ruling 
passion  of  his  closing  years,  and  yet  he  slowly  sank  into  melan- 
choly, a  baffled  ontologist. 

p  In  all  this,  his  type  of  reason  was  somewhat  paralleled  twenty 
'years  ago  by  Brown-Sequard  and  his  disciples'  advocacy  of 
testicular  extracts,  which  many  savants  here  and  in  Europe 
used  with  great  confidence  in  their  amazing  rejuvenating  effects. 
Jj  Unlike  modern  American  idealistic  professors,  who  left  others 
to  draw  the  ineluctable  practical  consequences  of  their  creed  in 
the  theory  and  practice  of  faith-cure,  he  did  not  hesitate  to 
enter  the  therapeutic  field  himself.  If  there  be  a  universal 
sin-cure,  as  Christianity  teaches,  which  all  must  experience  to 
be  saved,  there  must  also  be  a  universal  bodily  panacea.  If 
there  be  one  supreme  creative  energy,  why  not  a  sustaining  and 
curative  one?  No  doubt  tar-water— ten  grams  of  tar- water  to 
ten  grams  of  faith— did  work  cures,  but  so  can  almost  anything 


GENETICISM   AND  BERKELEY  151 

else,  provided  the  faith  be  not  wanting,  and  provided  the  remedy 
be  not  particularly  harmful.  But  how  sedulously  explain  that 
it  was  not  the  tar-water  itself,  for  that  was  only  phenomenal, 
but  the  great  principle  of  life  back  of  it  which  brought  the 
cures?  Here  we  psychoanalysts  find  a  remarkable  recrud- 
escence in  Berkeley's  mind  of  the  transubstantiation  psychosis  ] 
which  the  Medieval  Church  experienced  in  the  doctrine  that  the 
bread  and  wine  of  the  Sacrament  were  made  into  the  veritable 
body  and  blood  of  Our  Lord.  As  the  one  regenerated  the  soul, 
so  the  other  did  the  body,  not  by  its  phenomenal  material,  the 
pitch  and  resin,  but  by  its  inner  principle,  the  vital  life,  which 
expressed  the  life-giving  energy  of  God,  who  had  singled 
it  out  and  imparted  to  it  a  unique  and  special  power.  Berkeley 
sought  no  patent  for  his  new  medicine,  although  perhaps  no 
patent  medicine  was  ever  so  effectively  advertised  on  so  high 
a  plane. 

Siris  won  the  author,  then  but  little  known  outside  of  Eng- 
land and  her  colonies,  immediate  and  world-wide  fame,  and 
was  translated  into  many  languages.  That  and  his  further 
writings  on  tar-water  were  the  largest  of  his  works,  save  Al- 
ciphron,  and  by  far  the  most  scholarly,  with  allusions  to  a  wide 
range  of  philosophical  literature,  which  was  generally  lacking 
in  his  other  writings.  Very  many,  if  not  most,  of  his  con- 
temporaries knew  him  by  this  treatise  only,  which  is  now 
almost  entirely  ignored  by  both  the  history  of  philosophy  and 
epistemologists.  Those  who  treat  his  Theory  of  Vision,  Human 
Knowledge,  Alciphron,  Philonous  and  Hylas  seriously,  usually 
wish  his  Siris  forgotten,  but  to  the  geneticists,  it  is  precious  ( 
and  indispensable,  and  it  absorbed  the  chief  energies  of  nearly 
a  decade  and  a  half  of  his  maturest  years.  In  it  he  not  only 
hypostatized  ideas,  as  he  had  begun  to  do  in  the  Alciphron,  but 
passed  from  the  standpoint  of  Plato  almost  to  that  of  the  Neo- 
Platonists.  Tar-water  is  charged  with  pure  empyrean  fire.  It 
is  not  only  the  soul  of  all  vegetable  life,  but  the  theoretical  fire 
of  the  thermal  principle.  It  is  the  soul  of  the  world,  which 
will  go  out  when  the  world  cools  off.  It  is  the  principle  of 
life,  which  the  plant  bequeaths  to  the  animal  world.  Thus,  the 
chain  passes  from  the  physical  to  the  spiritual.  Deity  is  spiritu- 
alized tar-water,  a  universe  of  ideas  realized  in  living  persons, 
they  and  it  derived  from  absolute  being.  It  is  the  link  between 
physics  and  metaphysics,  medicine  and  theosophy.  It  is  some- 


152  JOURNAL   OF   RELIGIOUS   PSYCHOLOGY 

times  compared  with  Plato's  Timaeus  for  unintelligibility.  The 
type  of  emanationism  it  represents  is  rather  more  Heraclitic 
than  Alexandrian. 

The  tar-water  psychosis  in  Berkeley  was  an  expression  of 
the  unconscious  wish  of  his  soul  to  fill  the  great  void  which 
existed  in  almost  every  great  and  thoughtful  mind  till  evolu- 
tion, now  supplemented  by  geneticism,  came.  Tar-water  was 
more  than  his  ''flower  in  the  crannied  wall"  to  start  with, 
and  it  became  in  the  end  the  embodiment  of  his  one  and  all. 
It  was  to  him  all  that  ether  means  to  the  physicist,  and  proto- 
plasm to  the  biologist,  noumenalized.  In  the  beginning  was 
tar-water.  It  was  the  primal  source  and  therefore  also  the 
regenerator  of  life:  the  supreme  quintessence  of  the  alchemist, 
sifted  out  of  nature  by  pine  and  fir  trees,  the  most  precious 
bequest  of  the  plant-soul.  It  was  the  supreme  type  and  symbol 
too  of  salvation  and  of  deity.  As  the  great  and  good  before 
Christ,  Abraham,  Isaac,  Jacob,  and  the  rest  were  said  to  have 
anticipated  the  great  salvation  of  the  cross,  so  Berkeley  by  this 
chain  of  aphorisms  filled  the  void  that  yawned  and  ached,  con- 
sciously or  unconsciously,  in  nearly  every  soul,  before  evolution 
came  to  fill  it  and  he  gained  by  his  tar- water  dreameries  all  that 
he  could  of  the  wished  fulfilment  or  the  lasting  satisfaction 
which  the  genetic  view  of  the  world  always  has  and  always  will 
give  those  who  know  what  is  to  be  known,  and  put  their  faith  in 
and  cast  their  burdens  upon  it,  for  the  sake  of  its  great  uplift. 
This  was  the  latent  content  of  his  patent  emanationistic  dream. 
This  is  the  mother-lye  of  nature,  and,  at  the  same  time,  the 
web  of  thought  spun  from  nature  to  nature's  God.  "Ohne 
Phosphor  (=tar- water),  kein  Gedanke."  It  was  more  than 
Pfliiger  assigns  to  cyanogen.  Indeed,  it  was  more  than  the 
essential  ingredient  in  the  sacramental  blood  and  wine  of  the 
soul-communion,  for  it  regenerates  the  body  as  well  as  the  soul. 
Thus  idealists  always  take  amazing  liberties  with  the  world 
of  things  as  they  are,  but  Berkeley  outdoes  them  all,  for  his 
brooding  had  bred  a  profound  sense  of  the  unreality  of  facts. 
Otherwise,  he  never  could  have  gone  against  them  so  naively 
with  such  a  flimsy  tissue  of  speculations.  Xo  philosopher  is  so 
like  the  Baconian  spider  who  ejects  a  mesh  of  web  from  its 
spinnerette  on  the  top  of  a  picket  and  then  floats  from  the 
air  suspended  by  it.  For  subjective  idealists  there  can  be  no 
criterion  of  truth,  save  the  fitting  coherence  of  ideas,  one  with 


AXD   BEEKEi  153 

another.  Here  there  is  no  logical  consistency,  but  only  the 
crassest  syncretism  of  quod  libet  eclecticism.  The  same  in- 
genuity might  have  made  any  object,  element,  or  drug  what- 
ever, as  credible  a  eatholieon.  Not  a  living  soul  ever  did  or 
could  accept  his  system,  not  even  the  Hermetics,  and  Eraser 
himself  is  only  painfully  apologetic.  Many  delusions  of  the 
madhouse  have  been  more  systematized.  Thus  the  time  has 
surely  come  when  we  must  ask  whether  these  sickly  vagaries 
of  Berkeley,  which  haunted  all  his  maturer  years,  may  not  be 
used  as  a  wholesome  admonition  to  youth  to  cleave  close  to 
reality,  to  wreak  the  fullest  intensity  of  belief  upon  the  world 
as  it  is  to  sense,  lest  they  too  cripple  their  own  souls,  and  be 
left  to  believe  any  lie  that  speculative  fancy,  which  has  filled 
the  world  with  metaphysical  ghosts,  may  suggest.  This  is  the 
Nemesis  of  immaterialism.  That  Berkeley's  soul  still  goes  march- 
ing on  in  the  academic  world  to-day  and  is  not  relegated  to  the 
sibilant  limbo  of  mere  historicity  is  not  creditable  to  our  phil- 
osophic sanity,  for,  measured  by  higher  modern  standards  of 
normality,  his  soul  and  career  are  simply  pathological,  although 

a  ease  for  psychoanalysis,  he  will  long  be  of  unique  interest 
It  is  not  therefore  ghoulish  to  dig  up  and  mutilate  even  a 
decent  corpse  like  his,  if  it  lies  right  athwart  what  has  become 
a  most  traveled  highway,  where  it  trips  and  hips  most  and 
maims  a  few  who  traverse  it.  He  wished  posterity  to  judge 
him  chiefly  by  his  tar-water  philosophy.  We  certainly  cannot 
ignore  it.  When  any  professor  to-day  draws  about  himself  the 
awful  and  inviolable  circle  of  academic  freedom,  I  would  pause 
long  before  invading  it.  I  would  reflect  how,  in  Germany, 
Fechner  was  allowed  to  teach  that  plants  and  planets  were 
besouled,  that  the  psyche  of  the  sun  and  moon  were  regnant 
deities;  how  Bauer  thought  that  the  Gospels  were  myths,  when 
myth  had  a  very  low  connotation  as  mere  fancy;  how  Zollner, 
the  great  Leipzig  astronomer,  lectured  on  slate-writing  tricks 

lemonstrate  spiritism;  how  Kirschmann  was  allowed  to  teach 
red  socialism  right  across  the  street  from  the  most  absolute 
monarch  west  of  Russia,  but  I  would  not  forget  that  Hygeia 
is  a  goddess  on  whose  shrine  authority  is  compelling  us  more 
and  more  to  make  oblations  of  even  liberty  —  personal,  social 
corporate,  academic  —  and  Berkeleyism  with  its  languishing 
mental  involutions  brings  such  a  unique  blight  and  murrain,  and 
raise  the  question  of  mental  and  moral  hygiene;  and  there  are 


154  JOURNAL   OF   RELIGIOUS  PSYCHOLOGY 

others  in  the  history  of  philosophy  that  need  this  new,  higher 
criticism  and  censorship  on  the  grounds  of  academic  sanitation. 
Eddyism  is  the  inevitable  logical  consequence  of  New  England 
transcendentalism,  and  Emmanuelism  is  the  conclusion  of  aca- 
demic epistemology.  The  authors  of  these  systems  of  thought 
did  not  have  the  courage  or  the  practical  efficiency  to  draw  con- 
clusions, but  left  that  to  Mrs.  Eddy  and  Worcester.  Berkeley 
had  the  courage  to  apply  his  system. 

Alciphron  or  the  Minute  Philosopher,  contains  seven  dia- 
logues, written  in  America,  which  are  chiefly  devoted  to  an 
attack  upon  British  free-thinkers,  deists,  theists  and  atheists. 
Lysicles  stands  for  a  light-hearted  worldling  Mandeville,  who 
taught  that  private  vices  were  public  benefits.  Against  Shaftes- 
bury  's  reduction  of  conscience  to  good  taste  and  virtue  to  beauty, 
Euphrator  shows  that  aesthetics  is  not  sufficient  to  inspire  vir- 
tue or  morality,  but  that  we  must  have  faith  in  God,  whose 
existence  we  know  by  the  same  evidences  that  we  know  that  the 
souls  of  our  friends  exist. 

The  Analyst,  which  followed,  attacked  infidel  mathematicians 
and  astronomers  and  the  minute  philosophers  who  dealt  in 
infinitesimals  rather  than  men  of  the  world.  It  sought  to  show 
that  force  was  as  inconceivable  as  grace.  The  doctrine  of  con- 
tinuity and  fluctuations,  the  basis  of  calculus,  he  thought  very 
minute  and  philosophy  resting  on  presuppositions  that  were 
quite  as  much  credulity  as  faith.  His  antagonism  was  specially 
directed  against  the  astronomer  Halley  who  could  not  accept 
the  hypothesis  of  God  because  he  could  find  no  place  for  him 
in  the  universe. 

Thus,  to  go  back  early  in  his  life,  when  man  is  normally  in 
the  closest  touch  with  his  environment  in  nature,  Berkeley  com- 
mitted himself  to  the  hyperidealistic  creed  that  degraded  nature 
to  a  mere  set  of  symbols,  making  a  great  negation  before  he 
had  wrought  out  the  great  affirmation  which  always  and  only 
can  justify  denial.  Berkeley's  mature  and  later  life  furnishes 
us  with  the  spectacle  of  a  pure,  ardent,  ingenuous  soul  that 
had  early  mutilated  itself,  and  ever  after  was  seeking  consola- 
tion in  the  spiritual  for  losses  in  the  physical  world,  and  this 
is  the  motive  with  which  his  philosophy  is  still  taught.  To  wean 
from  nature,  impels  man  to  take  refuge  in  something  higher. 
Full  consolation,  however,  Berkeley  never  found,  as  may  have 


GENETICISM    AND   BERKELEY  155 

happened  with  a  more  abstract  thinker  like  Spinoza  and  one 
with  less  ties  to  and  sympathy  with  mundane  things.  His  later  v 
sadness  was  that  of  an  ontologist  who,  despite  all  his  subse- 
quent findings  in  the  transcendent  world,  felt  himself  baffled 
and  defeated.  He,  too,  felt  the  malign  spell  of  the  spirit  and 
method  he  had  conjured  up,  which  has  paled  life  in  so  many 
since.  How  can  one  agnostic  to  the  real  world  of  sense  be 
truly  gnostic  to  spiritual  verities?  He  did  not  pass  through 
nature  to  nature's  God,  but  found  Him  by  turning  away  from 
nature  as  effectively  as  anchorites  renounced  the  world. 
f*  Also,  genetically,  affirmations  precede  rather  than  follow 
''  denials.  His  scepticism  was  the  most  radical  in  all  the  history 
of  philosophy.  To  be  sure  it  was  the  jeu  d'  esprit  of  the  lush, 
life-loving,  gifted  adolescent,  sentimentally  a  perfervid  lover 
of  nature,  and  always  preferring  to  live  where  her  great  heart 
beat  strongest,  in  the  country.  A  temperament  that  peculiarly 
needs  to  feel  the  authoritativeness  of  objective  reality  when  it 
subjectifies  it  all,  does  experience  a  great  and  dizzying  tempor- 
ary exaltation,  a  mild  inebriation,  which  is  the  great  charm  of 
epistemology,  in  the  thought  that  the  majestic  spectacle  of 
sky,  landscape,  sea,  and  even  the  works  of  man  and  the  being 
of  one's  friends,  are  phantasmagorical  evolutions  of  our  indi- 
vidual selves,  that  all  we  thought  to  be  from  without  is  really 
from  within  the  individual.  This  is  a  delusion,  to  some  measure 
of  which  the  adolescent  soul  is  normally  prone,  as  it  breaks  : 
the  chrysalis  of  childhood  and  first  really  looks  out  into  the 
wide  world  of  nature  and  man,  but  it  is  legitimate  only  as 
dreamy  revery.  It  is  a  stage  full  of  significance,  but  it  should  J 
be  evanescent,  for  it  is  only  a  waking  dream  belonging  to  the 
realm  of  poetry  and  myth,  and  indeed  abundantly  expressed 
in  both,  but  not  fit  for  prose,  still  less  for  science,  the  very 
root  of  which  it  cuts.  Berkeleyan  immaterialism  has  its  place  f 
again  in  senescence,  as  a  stage  of  its  involution,  for  the  weary 
soul  withdrawing  from  earth.  Its  phenomena  are  those  of 
renunciation?  This,  the  long  Mst  of  scientific  men  from  Huxley 
to  W.  K.  Brooks,  who  have  been  fascinated  by  it,  after  a  life 
of  devotion  to  nature  and  science,  shows.  The  flitting  intro- 
version of  youth  is  only  like  so  many  other  things,  a  very  faint 
anticipatory  fore-gleam  of  old  age,  and,  if  intensified  in  early 
life  and  taken  seriously,  brings  senescence  before  its  time.  If  J 


156  JOURNAL   OF   RELIGIOUS   PSYCHOLOGY 

we  have  found  anything  in  a  life's  experience  with  philosophy 
better  than  the  world  of  sense,  then  of  course  we  turn  from 
the  latter  to  the  former,  but  this  withdrawal  and  valedictory 
must  never  be  first  or  forced.  Youthful  nature  need  not  be 
"sicklied  o'er  with  this  pale  cast  of  thought,"  which  belongs 
only  to  those  who  have  achieved  a  wholesome  culture,  and  a 
Ciceronian  or  perhaps  even  a  Metschnikoffian  old  age.  Sub- 
jective idealism  is  a  kit  of  tools  too  sharp  for  college  youth 
to  more  than  handle  with  great  circumspection.  The  imma- 
terialism  argument  is  the  most  desperate  of  all  vengeances  that 
religion,  the  spiritual  and  ideal  view  of  the  world,  has  ever 
attempted  to  take  upon  all  who  in  all  ages  have  scoffed  at  its 
faith.  If  all  its  masked  batteries  are  exploded  in  the  youthful 
soul,  progressive  atrophy  results,  for  it  tends  to  wean  both 
from  aesthetic  and  scientific  devotion  to  nature's  form  and 
phenomena.  Thus,  do  the  young  men  completely  infected  with 
it  ever  thereafter  achieve  anything  worth  while  in  either  art, 
or  science  1  Are  they  not  all  just  at  the  time  when  they  should 
be  superlatively  real  and  earnest,  sad  precocious  wiseacres  aloof, 
superior,  always  brandishing  a  few  simple  phrases  with  endless 
variations  and  chanting  a  theme  of  vanitas  vanitatum  as  old 
as  Ecclesiastes  ? 

f*  There  is  now  quite  a  literature  with  many  well-described 
cases  of  abnormal  weakening  or  loss  of  the  sense  of  reality 
and  of  the  outer  world  (in  Wernicke's  allo-psychic  field). 
These  patients  feel  that  all  objects  of  sense  are  unsubstantial, 
fading,  shadowy,  and  this  brings  depression,  alarm  and  dis- 
tress. Is  this  really  a  house,  a  tree,  my  brother,  or  am  I  dream- 
ing? I  can  make  nothing  seem  real.  Am  I  awake?  This  is 
their  plaint.  It  is  especially  the  visibilia  and  tangibilia  that  are 
affected.  This  disorder  usually  begins  with  states  of  fatigue; 
is  seen  sometimes  in  involutions  and  in  dementia  praecox,  and 
it  also  predisposes  to  these  conditions.  The  only  explanation 
so  far  suggested  is  that  two  things  occur  in  such  cases,  first  the 
muscular  tension  and  response  which  sensation  normally  ex- 
cites, and  which  has  been  the  chief  factor  in  the  so-called  extra- 
dition of  consciousness  or  of  sensation,  is  weakened  or  lost; 
and  secondly,  that  the  usual  associations  evoked  by  the  act  of 
perception  are  not  aroused,  that  is,  the  patient  does  not  see  with 
all  he  has  seen,  touch  with  all  he  has  touched,  but  this  single 
experience  is  isolated  from  its  natural  complexes.  F.  H.  Pack- 


GENETICISM    AND   BERKELEY  157 

ard1  describes  a  remarkable  patient  of  his  who  when  fatigued 
saw  all  solids  as  flat  surfaces,  as  Berkeley  says  we  all  really 
do.  In  looking  over  this  literature2  I  cannot  find  evidence  of 
any  case  on  record  who  ever  read  Berkeley,  and  he  certainly 
never  read  of  such  cases.  It  would  be  interesting  to  know 
what  both  they  and  he  would  have  said  of  each  other.  To  him, 
they  would  have  illustrated  the  sense  of  phenomenality  or  im- 
materialism,  but  they  are  mentally  crippled  thereby.  They  in 
turn  might  have  felt  the  fears  which  go  with  this  distemper 
allayed  by  finding  that  they  had  only  drifted  toward  the  posi- 
tion advocated  by  a  great  philosopher.  But,  had  the  perusal 
of  his  writings  led  them  to  the  feeling  that  their  senses  were 
deluders,  he  would  have  had  only  their  imprecations.  They 
certainly  have  felt  precisely  what  he  wishes  us  all  at  least  to 
know  if  not  to  feel,  viz.,  the  unreality  of  the  objective  world. 
Can  we  have  a  logical  conviction  that  the  verdicts  of  sense 
are  false,  without  sooner  or  later  coming  to  feel  more  or  less 
as  these  patients  do?  Should  we  strive  to  attain  this  realiza- 
tion of  unreality?  Are  not  these  patients,  in  fact,  practical 
Berkeleyans,  who,  had  they  taken  him  in  dead  earnest,  would 
thus  be  realizing  precisely  what  he  argues  for?  There  may  be 
different  answers  to  this  question,  but  one  thing  remains  cer- 
tain, viz.,  that  the  degree  of  intensity  of  the  sense  of  reality  of  1 
things  rises  and  falls  with  the  degree  of  muscular  tension  or  ,' 
reaction  and  also  with  the  range,  irradiation  and  vividness  of 
association.  With  loss  of  the  reality  sense  goes  relaxation  or 
atrophy  of  muscular  tonus  and  narrowing  of  the  breath  and 
richness  of  association  among  the  synapses,  or  a  shrinking  of 
the  field  of  apperception.  Thus  a  Berkeleyan  creed  must  in- 
evitably bring  some  loss  of  vigor,  of  the  energy  and  fidelity 
of  response  to  facts  and  events  in  the  outer  world.  If  the  doubt 
is  held  to  in  a  Pickwickian  way,  in  the  sphere  of  purely  reasoned 
events,  the  weakening  of  response  would  lie  more  in  the  domain, 
not  of  reflexes  but  of  deliberately  planned  voluntary  conduct 
as  directed  toward  outer  reality.  Again,  with  this  distemper 

111  The  Feeling  of  Unreality. "  Journal  of  Abnormal  Psychology.  June, 
1906.  Pp.  141-147. 

*  Very  conveniently  summarized  by  A.  Hoch.  { *  A  Review  of  Some 
Recent  Papers  upon  the  Loss  of  the  Feeling  of  Reality  and  Kindred  Symp- 
toms." Psy.  Butt.  1905.  Vol.  11,  pp.  233-241. 


158  JOURNAL   OF   RELIGIOUS   PSYCHOLOGY 

of  mind  are  generally  associated  disorders  in  the  somato-  and 
auto-psychic  field. 

f  These  disassociative  states,  with  their  depressive  syndromes, 
involve  retarded  and  weakened  movements,  both  of  body  and 
of  mind.  Most  tests  of  sensation  show  no  defect  whatever,  save 
in  a  few  cases,  and  very  slight  analgesia.  Even  ideas  and  feel- 
ings are  dim.  There  is  also  loss  of  interest  owing  to  psyehas- 
thenic  lowering  of  self-activity.  Recognition  fails;  parts  of 
the  body  are  not  felt  unless  touched  or  possibly  moved.  The 
eye  does  not  reach  out;  the  patient  does  not  know  how  things 
before  him  look  when  his  eyes  are  closed,  and  there  is  a  growing 
sense  of  insufficiency  and  aboulia  with  progressive  agnoscia. 
This  is  the  precise  opposite  of  Janet's  conception  of  the  most 
perfect  normality,  which  consists  in  the  most  vital  recognition 
of  and  response  to  present  environment  and  the  greatest  absorp- 
tion in  it. 

Just  in  proportion  as  this  loses  its  power,  the  soul  loses^its 
grasp  on  things.  From  growing  indifference  and  nil  admirari 
the  psyche  may  gradually  pass  to  the  opposite  state  called  the 
delire  de  negation.  In  this  state,  the  hold  of  presentative  words 
is  weakened  and  those  of  symbolic  words  increased. 

Many  from  Aristotle  down  have  recognized  that  the  eye  only 
perceives  color  and  shade,  that  size,  figure  and  motion  are  com- 
mon to  sight  and  touch,  that  rays  of  light  converge  to  a  focus 
in  the  eye  and  diverge  again,  inverting  the  image  on  the  retina, 
and  not  a  few  (quoted  by  Fraser)  before  Berkeley  have  realized 
that  we  have  to  learn  how  to  correlate  and  interpret  the  crude 
material  of  sensation  and  have  seen  the  representative  and 
symbolic  character  of  impressions,  that  we  never  see  but  infer 
distance  and  that  the  bonds  between  sight  and  touch  are  knit 
up  in  early  life;  but  all  this  pertains  to  the  genetic  or  evolu- 
tionary history  of  the  individual  and  the  race.  Hence,  the  fact 
that  the  adult  immediacy  of  perception  is  acquired  does  not 
affect  its  validity.  To  consciousness  itself  the  immediacy  is 
indecomposable  and  the  certainty  is  beyond  all  possibility  of 
doubt.  Philosophers  have  fallen  into  the  inveterate  fallacy  that 
has  been  so  characteristic  of  theologians  that  whatever  is  evolved 
cannot  be  perfect,  that  a  unity  made  up  of  elements  is  not 
complete  and  that  to  demonstrate  stages  of  development  impairs 
the  perfection  of  the  product.  But  the  legitimate  inference  from 
all  Berkeley's  facts  on  which  he  bases  his  new  theory  of  vision 


GENETICISM    AND   BERKELEY  159 

as  well  as  all  the  very  much  we  have  learned  since  in  this  field 
is  that  God  and  nature  have  spent  much  time  and  made  many 
a  trial  and  error  and  effort  in  evolving  senses  that  now  act 
perfectly,  instantaneously  and  truly  and  thus  have  been  tri- 
umphantly successful  and  have  not  blundered  or  failed  in  their 
work.  As  atomism  does  not  destroy  spacial  continuity,  nor  the 
paradox  of  Achilles  and  the  tortoise  disprove  motion,  so  the  fact 
that  mental  powers  have  been  acquired  by  many  tedious  and 
intricate  genetic  stages  does  not  invalidate  their  action.  Thus 
in  his  vision-theory  he  is  only  a  geneticist  without  knowing  it 
and  so  was  led  to  draw  negative  and  destructive  when  he  should 
have  drawn  positive  and  constructive  conclusions.  His  and  all 
analyses  of  perception  only  make  the  immediacy  and  certainty 
I  with  which  it  now  acts  all  the  more  precious  and  all  the  more 
/  trustworthy.  Had  Berkeley  enjoyed  the  unimpaired  healthful 
common-sense  respect  for  reality  that  characterizes  men  who 
have  attained  real  efficiency,  he  never  could  have  blown  the 
Bermuda  bubble,  which  was  only  a  dreamer's  reaction  to  a 
world  not  real  enough  to  be  treated  with  proper  respect.  This 
plan  has  always  been  thought  to  be  one  of  the  wildest  and  weird- 
est of  all  schemes  in  the  whole  history  of  education.  Had 
Berkeley  not  been  sickened,  like  the  medieval  alchemists,  by 
drinking  his  own  elixir,  he  could  never  have  evolved  his  almost 
lunatic  creed  concerning  tar-water.  He,  doubtless,  believed  in 
this  as  profoundly  as  he  believed  in  the  external  world,  and 
('probably  far  more  so,  but  with  the  weakening  of  his  sense  of 
everything  in  the  allo-psychic  field,  he  had  no  criterion  of  truth, 
and  so,  because  he  believed  in  tar-water,  that  was  the  nostrum 
of  all  nostrums.  It  needs  only  a  slight  psychoanalysis  of 
Berkeley's  mind  to  show  that  his  creed  both  expressed  and  had 
eaten  into  his  life,  most  of  which  was  spent  in  rural  isolation, 
as  if  practical  realities  rather  repelled  him,  making  his  mind 
his  own  kingdom,  and  like  Descartes,  occasionally  coming  into 
the  great  world  to  launch  some  scheme  so  fantastic  that  had 
it  not  been  made  plausible  by  a  simple,  attractive  personality, 
great  persuasive  power  and  scholarly  ingenuity,  would  have 
sent  those  who  held  it  to  the  madhouse  with  delusions  of  great- 
ness. This  distemper  often  goes  with  disorders  in  the  somato- 
and1  auto-psychic  spheres,  that  is,  the  patient's  notion  of  the 
reality  of  his  own  body  and  of  his  inmost  ego  is  impaired,  and 
so,  the  self  in  its  psycho-physic  aspect  suffers.  Whether  this 


160  JOURNAL    OP    RELIGIOUS   PSYCHOLOGY 

tendency  is  logically  or  psychologically  associated  in  the  field 
of  philosophy  with  loss  of  outer  reality,  we  shall  discuss  affirma- 
tively in  the  case  of  Hume,  and  show  how,  while  Berkeley's 
self  had  been  unduly  exalted,  that  of  Hume  had  been  unduly 
mortified,  and  that  his  denial  of  cause  and  self  was^jdirectly 
favored  by  tendencies  and  experiences  in  his  own  life.l 

It  was  Hume  (Treatise  of  Human  Nature,  1739  and  Inquiries, 
1748)  who  read  only  Berkeley's  early  sceptical  writings,  and 
who  would  have  abhorred  his  positive  religious  views,  who,  if 
he  did  not  save  the  Berkeleyan  negative  way  of  thought  from 
progressive  oblivion,  developed  it  with  a  vigor  of  thought  far 
greater  than  that  of  Berkeley,  and  lent  to  it  the  influence  of 
his  name,  which  shone  with  a  wider  luster.  It  was  Hume  who 
made  Berkeleyism  an  integral  part  of  the  history  of  philosophy. 
Hume's  chief  motive  was  to  weaken  the  hold  of  theological 
thought,  rather  than  to  strengthen  it,  so  that,  even  if  Berkeley 
contributed  anything  that  strengthened  the  religious  faith  of 
mankind,  Hume  used  Berkeley's  prime  principle  far  more 
effectively  to  upset  faith.  Indeed,  Hume  almost  saved  Berkeley 
from  being  a  joke.  Moreover,  was  it  not  significant  that  Fraser, 
at  the  morturi  salutamus  age  of  eighty,  edited  Berkeley  almost 
as  his  valedictory  to  life,  as  if  saying  "Farewell,  vain  world, 
I'm  going  home."  Geneticists  see  all  three  dimensions  of  life, 
never  forgetting  the  temporal  perspective,  as  even  experimenters 
are  now  prone  to  do.  For  psychoanalysis  trivial  and  undeter- 
mined details  are  often  graver  than  those  of  seemingly  serious 
import.  Geneticists  believe  that  philosophy  is  the  love  and 
pursuit  of  wisdom,  and  may  even  prefer  its  pursuit  to  possession, 
and  do  not  feel  compelled  to  decide  even  between  parallelism 
and  interaction. 

Can  man  accept  only  so  much  that  is  given  from  without? 
Are  there  more  or  less  fixed  quanta  of  credibilia,  whether  per- 
cepts, facts  or  faith?  Is  the  faculty  of  belief  easily  over-taxed, 
so  that  elimination  at  either  end  of  the  scale  that  connects 
sensuous  and  spiritual  intensifies  absorption  in  and  docility  to 
the  other?  Must  we  put  out  either  the  inner  or  the  outer  eye 
in  order  to  see  more  clearly  with  the  other?  Does  active  doubt 
in  the  world  of  metaphysics  or  of  physics  depend  on  apperception 
of  or  quickened  interest  in  the  other?  Is  the  carrying  power 
of  the  soul  for  sense  weakened,  if  we  practice  it  for  spiritual 


GENETICLSM    AND   BERKELEY  161 

things,  and  vice  versa,  as  we  often  conceive  reason  and  faith 
to  be  rivals,  one  flourishing  at  the  expense  of  the  other?  Must 
we  specialize  in  cleaving  to  the  one  and  rejecting  the  other? 
If  this  be  so,  can  we  not  say  that  Berkeley  inverted  the  natural 
order  by  turning  from  sense  before  he  had  felt  the  natural  im- 
pulse which  had,  in  every  thinker  of  the  past,  who  has  grown 
negligent  of  sense,  given  him  the  only  normal  motivation  to 
do  so,  viz.,  absorption  in  metaphysical  or  spiritual  verities? 
They  have  never  scuttled  the  ship  of  sense  before  they  have  been 
well  established  with  all  their  belongings  on  the  ship  of  faith. 
They  have  become  denizens  of  the_higherjbefore  they  forswore 
their  allegiance  to  the  lower  kingdom.  They  have  built  secure 
heavenly  mansions  before  they  vacated  the  earthly  tenements 
of  sense.  They  have  not  burned  this  world  in  order  that  their 
homelessness  here  might  impel  them  to  seek  a  higher  one. 

Finally,  no  subjective  analysis  of  the  process  oL  seeing  and 
touching  can  ever  reveal  anything  but  a  simple,  immediate, 
unitary  act  of  direct  intuition.  Berkeley's  analysis  is  essen- 
tially not  subjective,  but  objective.  It  regards  nerves,  brain 
processes,  conjectural  developmental  associations,  observations 
on  those  restored  to  sight,  babies,  etc.,  and  only  by  this  method 
can  the  act  of  perception  appear  to  be  complex  or  in  any  way 
accessible  to  doubt.  Introspection  can  never  doubt  that  e.g. 
if  we  see  a  stick,  we  could  put  forth  our  hand  and  touch  it. 
If  we  knew  nothing  of  the  anatomy  and  physiology  of  the  eye 
and  central  nervous  system,  or  of  abnormalities,  we  normal 
adults  could  never  possibly  even  distinguish  between  visibilia 
and  tangibilia.  The  Berkeleyan  procedure,  therefore,  is  an  ob- 
jective construction,  according  to  which  a  series  of  sense  images 
of  what  might  and  approximately  does  go  on  in  the  brain,  which 
from  the  standpoint  of  psychology  is  only  an  abstraction,  is 
taken  inward  and  used  to  confuse  thought.  It  is  an  alien  point 
of  view,  imported  from  the  objective  into  the  very  different 
subjective  sphere.  Otherwise,  we  could  never  conceive  that  a 
sensation  or  perception  could  occur  without  a  real  outer  cause, 
independent  of  it  and  persisting,  indifferent  as  to  whether  it 
was  perceived  or  not.  Thus,  the  psychologist,  if  he  remain  true 
to  his  own  consciousness,  will  always  be  able  to  see  that  things 
I/perceived  are  really  outer  things.  Though  I  may  not  know 
all  about  their  meta-sensuous  nature,  they  are  external  and  inde- 


162  JOURNAL  OP   RELIGIOUS  PSYCHOLOGY 

pendent  of  myself.  To  deny  this,  means  to  impair  the  founda- 
tions of  the  very  idea  of  causation  and  of  the  ego,  both  of 
which  find  their  best  paradigms  in  the  perceptive  process. 

The  New  Theory  of  Vision  wrecks  youth  and  leaves  ingenuous 
souls  floating  in  gurgite  vasto.  The  wreckers  thus  have  them 
at  their  mercy.  Euclid  rests  back  on  a  more  primitive  eye- 
geometry,  which  it  amplifies  and  confirms.  But  Berkeleyism 
rests  only  upon  the  dreamy  revery  of  fatigue,  and  daily  life, 
to  say  nothing  of  serious  science,  is  its  standing  refutation. 


14  DAY  USE 

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